Recently, an article appeared on the Web and in newspapers around the country, one that has prompted this, the second "Dead-itorial" in HORROR-WOOD’s over eight years on the World Weird Web.

The article, by Christy Lemire, for the Associated Press, was entitled, "Horror movies return to their grisly roots." It was, more or less, a bit of a fluff piece on yet another gore fest packaged as a horror movie, but the difference was that this one was a return to horror film’s "roots"—straightforward slash and hack as opposed to the recent spate of "spoof" horror films. As the writer put it:

Today's horror movies are more likely to be dripping with blood than irony, with films like Wolf Creek, the Saw series and this week's Hostel representing a return to their grisly, low-budget '70s roots.

While the Scream trilogy grossed hundreds of millions of dollars in the late 1990s with characters who winked at the camera in playful mockery of the genre's conventions, horror flicks like Hostel, Eli Roth's follow-up to his gory 2003 debut Cabin Fever, will show you a character whose eye is dangling from its socket after a long afternoon of torture.

"I think scary movies are back," Roth added. "People clearly don't want to see a horror movie to laugh."

Horror film’s "roots" in the Seventies? Scary movies are back?

What about the 60 years of horror films that preceded the Seventies slasher cycle? And since when graphic violence like a "dangling eyeball" represent "scary movies"?

Actually, such grue represents only explicit gore on screen, pioneered for profit by H. G. Lewis and Dave Friedman back in the early Sixties. Those two non-auteurs called their product "gore films," knew they weren’t anything much, but also had a hunch that the product would sell, and sell it did. That’s the "roots" of gruesome butchery on screen, not "scary movies" or classic horror.

While the ignorance of the writer is understandable—the quality of journalism in this country has suffered a steady decline for decades—the writer’s and Eli Roth’s conception of horror film’s roots is all too common now. Several generations have reached adulthood since Jason’s Mom first hacked teenage campers to death in the original Friday The Thirteenth, and thus they see gore films in a subtext far removed from reality. To them, Pinhead and Freddy and other body-count fillers are "classic" because that’s what they grew up with.

Fair enough, perhaps. Understandable, certainly. But we’re going to set the record straight.

Classic horror films—the "roots" of the horror film--from any historical perspective, sprouted during the years when the entire genre was created and nurtured and formulized. That takes in the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties. The Fifties and Sixties ushered in new and timely takes on the classic horror film, with more explicit horror depicted on screen, the mixture of sci-fi with horror, giant monsters, psychological horror, and so on.

This continued into the Seventies, and it was the shank end of the Seventies when filmmakers brought the "gore films" of Lewis and Friedman into the mainstream with their version of "dangling eyeballs," viz., the aforementioned Friday The Thirteenth films and the many copycats that followed…the films that the article quoted above called horror film’s "roots."

Fortunately, the true classic horror film’s roots are deeply embedded in the soil of filmdom, and current ignorance will not affect them. The advancement of DVD has brought many classic horror films to light, and this unearthing of the "true vintage" will keep classic horror "undead" for us and, we believe, for the generations that have followed and will follow us Monster Boomers.